Tài liệu Practical mod_perl-CHAPTER 14:Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement doc

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. 508 Chapter 14 CHAPTER 14 Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement If you have already worked with mod_perl, you have probably noticed that it can be difficult to keep your mod_perl processes from using a lot of memory. The less mem- ory you have, the fewer processes you can run and the worse your server will perform, especially under a heavy load. This chapter presents several common situations that can lead to unnecessary consumption of RAM, together with preventive measures. Controlling Your Memory Usage When you need to control the size of your httpd processes, use one of the two mod- ules, Apache::GTopLimit and Apache::SizeLimit, which kill Apache httpd processes when those processes grow too large or lose a big chunk of their shared memory. The two modules differ in their methods for finding out the memory usage. Apache:: GTopLimit relies on the libgtop library to perform this task, so if this library can be built on your platform you can use this module. Apache::SizeLimit includes differ- ent methods for different platforms—you will have to check the module’s manpage to figure out which platforms are supported. Defining the Minimum Shared Memory Size Threshold As we have already discussed, when it is first created, an Apache child process usu- ally has a large fraction of its memory shared with its parent. During the child pro- cess’s life some of its data structures are modified and a part of its memory becomes unshared (pages become “dirty”), leading to an increase in memory consumption. You will remember that the MaxRequestsPerChild directive allows you to specify the number of requests a child process should serve before it is killed. One way to limit the memory consumption of a process is to kill it and let Apache replace it with a newly started process, which again will have most of its memory shared with the Apache parent. The new child process will then serve requests, and eventually the cycle will be repeated. ,ch14.24450 Page 508 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Controlling Your Memory Usage | 509 This is a fairly crude means of limiting unshared memory, and you will probably need to tune MaxRequestsPerChild, eventually finding an optimum value. If, as is likely, your service is undergoing constant changes, this is an inconvenient solution. You’ll have to retune this number again and again to adapt to the ever-changing code base. You really want to set some guardian to watch the shared size and kill the process if it goes below some limit. This way, processes will not be killed unnecessarily. To set a shared memory lower limit of 4 MB using Apache::GTopLimit, add the fol- lowing code into the startup.pl file: use Apache::GTopLimit; $Apache::GTopLimit::MIN_PROCESS_SHARED_SIZE = 4096; and add this line to httpd.conf: PerlFixupHandler Apache::GTopLimit Don’t forget to restart the server for the changes to take effect. Adding these lines has the effect that as soon as a child process shares less than 4 MB of memory (the corollary being that it must therefore be occupying a lot of memory with its unique pages), it will be killed after completing its current request, and, as a consequence, a new child will take its place. If you use Apache::SizeLimit you can accomplish the same by adding this to startup.pl: use Apache::SizeLimit; $Apache::SizeLimit::MIN_SHARE_SIZE = 4096; and this to httpd.conf: PerlFixupHandler Apache::SizeLimit If you want to set this limit for only some requests (presumably the ones you think are likely to cause memory to become unshared), you can register a post-processing check using the set_min_shared_size( ) function. For example: use Apache::GTopLimit; if ($need_to_limit) { # make sure that at least 4MB are shared Apache::GTopLimit->set_min_shared_size(4096); } or for Apache::SizeLimit: use Apache::SizeLimit; if ($need_to_limit) { # make sure that at least 4MB are shared Apache::SizeLimit->setmin(4096); } Since accessing the process information adds a little overhead, you may want to check the process size only every N times. In this case, set the $Apache::GTopLimit:: ,ch14.24450 Page 509 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. 510 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement CHECK_EVERY_N_REQUESTS variable. For example, to test the size every other time, put the following in your startup.pl file: $Apache::GTopLimit::CHECK_EVERY_N_REQUESTS = 2; or, for Apache::SizeLimit: $Apache::SizeLimit::CHECK_EVERY_N_REQUESTS = 2; You can run the Apache::GTopLimit module in debug mode by setting: PerlSetVar Apache::GTopLimit::DEBUG 1 in httpd.conf. It’s important that this setting appears before the Apache::GTopLimit module is loaded. When debug mode is turned on, the module reports in the error_log file the memory usage of the current process and also when it detects that at least one of the thresh- olds was crossed and the process is going to be killed. Apache::SizeLimit controls the debug level via the $Apache::SizeLimit::DEBUG variable: $Apache::SizeLimit::DEBUG = 1; which can be modified any time, even after the module has been loaded. Potential drawbacks of memory-sharing restrictions In Chapter 11 we devised a formula to calculate the optimum value for the MaxClients directive when sharing is taking place. In the same section, we warned that it’s very important that the system not be heavily engaged in swapping. Some systems do swap in and out every so often even if they have plenty of real memory available, and that’s OK. The following discussion applies to conditions when there is hardly any free memory available. If the system uses almost all of its real memory (including the cache), there is a dan- ger of the parent process’s memory pages being swapped out (i.e., written to a swap device). If this happens, the memory-usage reporting tools will report all those swapped out pages as nonshared, even though in reality these pages are still shared on most OSs. When these pages are getting swapped in, the sharing will be reported back to normal after a certain amount of time. If a big chunk of the memory shared with child processes is swapped out, it’s most likely that Apache::SizeLimit or Apache::GTopLimit will notice that the shared memory threshold was crossed and as a result kill those processes. If many of the parent process’s pages are swapped out, and the newly created child process is already starting with shared memory below the limit, it’ll be killed immediately after serving a single request (assuming that the $CHECK_EVERY_N_REQUESTS variable is set to 1). This is a very bad situation that will eventually lead to a state where the system won’t respond at all, as it’ll be heavily engaged in the swapping process. ,ch14.24450 Page 510 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Controlling Your Memory Usage | 511 This effect may be less or more severe depending on the memory manager’s imple- mentation, and it certainly varies from OS to OS and between kernel versions. There- fore, you should be aware of this potential problem and simply try to avoid situations where the system needs to swap at all, by adding more memory, reducing the number of child servers, or spreading the load across more machines (if reducing the number of child servers is not an option because of the request-rate demands). Defining the Maximum Memory Size Threshold No less important than maximizing shared memory is restricting the absolute size of the processes. If the processes grow after each request, and if nothing restricts them from growing, you can easily run out of memory. Again you can set the MaxRequestsPerChild directive to kill the processes after a few requests have been served. But as we explained in the previous section, this solution is not as good as one that monitors the process size and kills it only when some limit is reached. If you have Apache::GTopLimit (described in the previous section), you can limit a process’s memory usage by setting the $Apache::GTopLimit::MAX_PROCESS_SIZE direc- tive. For example, if you want processes to be killed when they reach 10 MB, you should put the following in your startup.pl file: $Apache::GTopLimit::MAX_PROCESS_SIZE = 10240; Just as when limiting shared memory, you can set a limit for the current process using the set_max_size( ) method in your code: use Apache::GTopLimit; Apache::GTopLimit->set_max_size(10000); For Apache::SizeLimit, the equivalents are: use Apache::SizeLimit; $Apache::SizeLimit::MAX_PROCESS_SIZE = 10240; and: use Apache::SizeLimit; Apache::SizeLimit->setmax(10240); Defining the Maximum Unshared Memory Size Threshold Instead of setting the shared and total memory usage thresholds, you can set a single threshold that measures the amount of unshared memory by subtracting the shared memory size from the total memory size. Both modules allow you to set the thresholds in similar ways. With Apache:: GTopLimit , you can set the unshared memory threshold server-wide with: $Apache::GTopLimit::MAX_PROCESS_UNSHARED_SIZE = 6144; ,ch14.24450 Page 511 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. 512 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement and locally for a handler with: Apache::GTopLimit->set_max_unshared_size(6144); If you are using Apache::SizeLimit, the corresponding settings would be: $Apache::SizeLimit::MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE = 6144; and: Apache::SizeLimit->setmax_unshared(6144); Coding for a Smaller Memory Footprint The following sections present proactive techniques that prevent processes from growing large in the first place. Memory Reuse Consider the code in Example 14-1. When executed, it prints: size before: 1830912 B size inside: 21852160 B size after: 21852160 B This script starts by printing the size of the memory it occupied when it was first loaded. The opening curly brace starts a new block, in which a lexical variable $x is populated with a string 10,000,000 bytes in length. The script then prints the new size of the process and exits from the block. Finally, the script again prints the size of the process. Since the variable $x is lexical, it is destroyed at the end of the block, before the final print statement, thus releasing all the memory that it was occupying. But from the output we can clearly see that a huge chunk of memory wasn’t released to the OS— the process’s memory usage didn’t change. Perl reuses this released memory inter- nally. For example, let’s modify the script as shown in Example 14-2. Example 14-1. memory_hog.pl use GTop ( ); my $gtop = GTop->new; my $proc = $gtop->proc_mem($$); print "size before: ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; { my $x = 'a' x 10**7; print "size inside: ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; } print "size after: ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; ,ch14.24450 Page 512 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Coding for a Smaller Memory Footprint | 513 When we execute this script, we will see the following output: size before : 1835008 B size inside : 21852160 B size after : 21852160 B size inside2: 21852160 B size after2: 21852160 B As you can see, the memory usage of this script was no more than that of the previ- ous one. So we have just learned that Perl programs don’t return memory to the OS until they quit. If variables go out of scope, the memory they occupied is reused by Perl for newly created or growing variables. Suppose your code does memory-intensive operations and the processes grow fast at first, but after a few requests the sizes of the processes stabilize as Perl starts to reuse the acquired memory. In this case, the wisest approach is to find this limiting size and set the upper memory limit to a slightly higher value. If you set the limit lower, processes will be killed unnecessarily and lots of redundant operations will be per- formed by the OS. Big Input, Big Damage This section demonstrates how a malicious user can bring the service down or cause problems by submitting unexpectedly big data. Imagine that you have a guestbook script/handler, which works fine. But you’ve for- gotten about a small nuance: you don’t check the size of the submitted message. A 10 MB core file copied and pasted into the HTML textarea entry box intended for a guest’s message and submitted to the server will make the server grow by at least 10 MB. (Not to mention the horrible experience users will go through when trying to view the guest book, since the contents of the binary core file will be displayed.) If your Example 14-2. memory_hog2.pl use GTop ( ); my $gtop = GTop->new; my $proc = $gtop->proc_mem($$); print "size before : ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; { my $x = 'a' x 10**7; print "size inside : ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; } print "size after : ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; { my $x = 'a' x 10; print "size inside2: ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; } print "size after2: ", $gtop->proc_mem($$)->size( ), " B\n"; ,ch14.24450 Page 513 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. 514 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement server is short of memory, after a few more submissions like this one it will start swap- ping, and it may be on its way to crashing once all the swap memory is exhausted. To prevent such a thing from happening, you could check the size of the submitted argument, like this: my $r = shift; my %args = $r->args; my $message = exists $args{message} ? $args{message} : ''; die "the message is too big" unless length $message > 8192; # 8KB While this prevents your program from adding huge inputs into the guest book, the size of the process will grow anyway, since you have allowed the code to process the submitted form’s data. The only way to really protect your server from accepting huge inputs is not to read data above some preset limit. However, you cannot safely rely on the Content-Length header, since that can easily be spoofed. You don’t have to worry about GET requests, since their data is submitted via the query string of the URI, which has a hard limit of about 8 KB. Think about disabling file uploads if you don’t use them. Remember that a user can always write an HTML form from scratch and submit it to your program for process- ing, which makes it easy to submit huge files. If you don’t limit the size of the form input, even if your program rejects the faulty input, the data will be read in by the server and the process will grow as a result. Here is a simple example that will readily accept anything submitted by the form, including fields that you didn’t create, which a malicious user may have added by mangling the original form: use CGI; my $q = CGI->new; my %args = map {$_ => $q->param($_)} $q->params; If you are using CGI.pm, you can set the maximum allowed POST size and disable file uploads using the following setting: use CGI; $CGI::POST_MAX = 1048576; # max 1MB allowed $CGI::DISABLE_UPLOADS = 1; # disable file uploads The above setting will reject all submitted forms whose total size exceeds 1 MB. Only non–file upload inputs will be processed. If you are using the Apache::Request module, you can disable file uploads and limit the maximum POST size by passing the appropriate arguments to the new( ) function. The following example has the same effect as the CGI.pm example shown above: my $apr = Apache::Request->new($r, POST_MAX => 1048576, DISABLE_UPLOADS => 1 ); ,ch14.24450 Page 514 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Coding for a Smaller Memory Footprint | 515 Another alternative is to use the LimitRequestBody directive in httpd.conf to limit the size of the request body. This directive can be set per-server, per-directory, per-file, or per-location. The default value is 0, which means unlimited. As an example, to limit the size of the request body to 2 MB, you should add: LimitRequestBody 2097152 The value is set in bytes (2097152 bytes = = 2 MB). In this section, we have presented only a single example among many that can cause your server to use more memory than planned. It helps to keep an open mind and to explore what other things a creative user might try to do with your service. Don’t assume users will only click where you intend them to. Small Input, Big Damage This section demonstrates how a small input submitted by a malicious user may hog the whole server. Imagine an online service that allows users to create a canvas on the server side and do some fancy image processing. Among the inputs that are to be submitted by the user are the width and the height of the canvas. If the program doesn’t restrict the maximum values for them, some smart user may ask your program to create a can- vas of 1,000,000 × 1,000,000 pixels. In addition to working the CPU rather heavily, the processes that serve this request will probably eat all the available memory (including the swap space) and kill the server. How can the user do this, if you have prepared a form with a pull-down list of possi- ble choices? Simply by saving the form and later editing it, or by using a GET request. Don’t forget that what you receive is merely an input from a user agent, and it can very easily be spoofed by anyone knowing how to use LWP::UserAgent or something equivalent. There are various techniques to prevent users from fiddling with forms, but it’s much simpler to make your code check that the submitted values are accept- able and then move on. If you do some relational database processing, you will often encounter the need to read lots of records from the database and then print them to the browser after they are formatted. Let’s look at an example. We will use DBI and CGI.pm for this example. Assume that we are already connected to the database server (refer to the DBI manpage for a complete reference to the DBI module): my $q = new CGI; my $default_hits = 10; my $hits = int $q->param("hints") || $default_hits; my $do_sql = "SELECT from foo LIMIT 0,$hits"; my $sth = $dbh->prepare($do_sql); $sth->execute; ,ch14.24450 Page 515 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. 516 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement while (@row_ary = $sth->fetchrow_array) { # do DB accumulation into some variable } # print the data In this example, the records are accumulated in the program data before they are printed. The variables that are used to store the records that matched the query will grow by the size of the data, in turn causing the httpd process to grow by the same amount. Imagine a search engine interface that allows a user to choose to display 10, 50, or 100 results. What happens if the user modifies the form to ask for 1,000,000 hits? If you have a big enough database, and if you rely on the fact that the only valid choices would be 10, 50, or 100 without actually checking, your database engine may unexpectedly return a million records. Your process will grow by many mega- bytes, possibly eating all the available memory and swap space. The obvious solution is to disallow arbitrary inputs for critical variables like this one. Another improvement is to avoid the accumulation of matched records in the pro- gram data. Instead, you could use DBI::bind_columns( ) or a similar function to print each record as it is fetched from the database. In Chapter 20 we will talk about this technique in depth. Think Production, Not Development Developers often use sample inputs for testing their new code. But sometimes they forget that the real inputs can be much bigger than those they used in development. Consider code like this, which is common enough in Perl scripts: { open IN, $file or die $!; local $/; $content = <IN>; # slurp the whole file in close IN; } If you know for sure that the input will always be small, the code we have presented here might be fine. But if the file is 5 MB, the child process that executes this script when serving the request will grow by that amount. Now if you have 20 children, and each one executes this code, together they will consume 20 × 5 MB = 100 MB of RAM! If, when the code was developed and tested, the input file was very small, this potential excessive memory usage probably went unnoticed. Try to think about the many situations in which your code might be used. For exam- ple, it’s possible that the input will originate from a source you did not envisage. Your code might behave badly as a result. To protect against this possibility, you might want to try to use other approaches to processing the file. If it has lines, per- haps you can process one line at a time instead of reading them all into a variable at ,ch14.24450 Page 516 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. Coding for a Smaller Memory Footprint | 517 once. If you need to modify the file, use a temporary file. When the processing is fin- ished, you can overwrite the source file. Make sure that you lock the files when you modify them. Often you just don’t expect the input to grow. For example, you may want to write a birthday reminder process intended for your own personal use. If you have 100 friends and relatives about whom you want to be reminded, slurping the whole file in before processing it might be a perfectly reasonable way to approach the task. But what happens if your friends (who know you as one who usually forgets their birthdays) are so surprised by your timely birthday greetings that they ask you to allow them to use your cool invention as well? If all 100 friends have yet another 100 friends, you could end up with 10,000 records in your database. The code may not work well with input of this size. Certainly, the answer is to rewrite the code to use a DBM file or a relational database. If you continue to store the records in a flat file and read the whole database into memory, your code will use a lot of memory and be very slow. Passing Variables Let’s talk about passing variables to a subroutine. There are two ways to do this: you can pass a copy of the variable to the subroutine (this is called passing by value)or you can instead pass a reference to it (a reference is just a pointer, so the variable itself is not copied). Other things being equal, if the copy of the variable is larger than a pointer to it, it will be more efficient to pass a reference. Let’s use the example from the previous section, assuming we have no choice but to read the whole file before any data processing takes place and its size is 5 MB. Sup- pose you have some subroutine called process( ) that processes the data and returns it. Now say you pass $content by value and process( ) makes a copy of it in the familiar way: my $content = qq{foobarfoobar}; $content = process($content); sub process { my $content = shift; $content =~ s/foo/bar/gs; return $content; } You have just copied another 5 MB, and the child has grown in size by another 5 MB. Assuming 20 Apache children, you can multiply this growth again by factor of 20—now you have 200 MB of wasted RAM! This will eventually be reused, but it’s still a waste. Whenever you think the variable may grow bigger than a few kilobytes, definitely pass it by reference. ,ch14.24450 Page 517 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM [...]... modify a read-only value: $content = process("string foo"); 518 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc All rights reserved ,ch14.24450 Page 519 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM Memory Leakage It’s normal for a process to grow when it processes its first few requests They may be different... existence for optimization reasons If you find this confusing, probably the best approach is to run diff twice when you test your code Now let’s run the cvrundiff( ) function on this example, as shown in Example 14-6 Example 14-6 leaktest3.pl package LeakTest2; use B::LexInfo ( ); my $global = "FooA"; sub test { $$global = 1; ++$global; } 522 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement. .. contain FooB because of the increment operation at the end of the first run Consider: $foo = "AAA"; print "$foo\n"; $foo++; print "$foo\n"; which prints: AAA AAB 520 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc All rights reserved ,ch14.24450 Page 521 Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:43 PM So every... in mod_perl Developer’s Cookbook, by Geoffrey Young, Paul Lindner, and Randy Kobes (Sams Publishing) • Advanced Perl Programming, by Sriram Srinivasan (O’Reilly) 524 | Chapter 14: Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2004 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc All rights reserved ... Consider this code, for example: sub test { my ($string) = @_;} test("a string"); B::LexInfo will show you that Perl does not release the value from $string unless you undef( ) it This is because Perl anticipates that the memory will be needed for another string, the next time the subroutine is entered You’ll see similar behavior for @array lengths, %hash keys, and scratch areas of the padlist for operations... process($content); sub process { $_[0] =~ s/foo/bar/gs; } From perldoc perlsub: The array @_ is a local array, but its elements are aliases for the actual scalar parameters In particular, if an element $_[0] is updated, the corresponding argument is updated (or an error occurs if it is not possible to update) Be careful when you write this kind of subroutine for use by someone else; it can be confusing It’s not... acquire only 5 KB, you won’t see the process grow even if the code has actually leaked these 5 KB Now it might take 20 or more requests for the leaking script served by the same process before you would see that process start growing again A process may leak memory for several reasons: badly written system C/C++ libraries used in the httpd binary and badly written Perl code are the most common Perl... leaks in your code, then for detecting leaks in C/C++ libraries you should either use the technique of sampling the memory usage described above, or use C/C++ developer tools designed for this purpose This topic is beyond the scope of this book The Apache::Leak module (derived from Devel::Leak) might help you to detect leaks in your code Consider the script in Example 14-3 Coding for a Smaller Memory Footprint... includes a StatusLexInfo option that can show you the internals of your code via B::LexInfo See Chapter 21 for more information Conclusion The impacts of coding style, efficiency, differences in data, potential abuse by users, and a host of other factors combine to make each web service unique You will therefore need to consider these things carefully in the light of your unique knowledge of your system and... 2 SVs leaked !!! This module uses the simple approach of walking the Perl internal table of allocated SVs It records them before entering the scope of the code under test and after leaving the scope At the end, a comparison of the two sets is performed, sv_ dump( ) is called for anything that did not exist in the first set, and the difference in counts is reported Note that you will see the dumps of . 14 Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement If you have already worked with mod_ perl, you have probably noticed that it can be difficult to keep your mod_ perl. Defensive Measures for Performance Enhancement There are several forms of syntax you can use to pass and use variables passed by ref- erence. For example: my